


On the Oxford Bus to London

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Filling in the missing bits., Gen, Idiots in Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 16:18:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19321723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Missing scene. Our two boys travel in the dark from one dispensation to a new dispensation.There's a lot they don't know yet. But there's a lot they do. One thing they know is how to be together.





	On the Oxford Bus to London

The bus from Taddfield to London rolled through the dark night, its two Empyrials seated together, side by side, unsleeping, in simple, comfortless molded seats. The dim light of the bus shone on the bright coat and gleaming white hair of the angel, and struck embers in the not-quite-natural red of the demon. It had been a long week, a very long week, and they were tired in a way only Empyrials feel exhaustion.

Seen through ordinary eyes the two are already exceptional to consider. From outside the bus they looked small and isolated, in spite of sitting closely side by side. Like the haunting lost souls in an Edward Hopper painting. Indeed, if you could take their unseen wings, their dangerous natures, and their part in God’s Ineffable Plan into account, “Nighthawks” would not seem too strange a term for them. Not that night. Not during the last, slowly passing seconds of the Apocalypse.

“Apocalapse,” the dark one murmured, and gave a slightly hysterical giggle.

“What?” The fair-haired little jam pot murmured back, softly.

If you had the eyes to see, you’d have seen his white wings spread, one sheltering the dark one, the other shielding the two from the aisle itself. It was an intimate gesture, but fitting. Seen through the correct eyes, the angel was in a Roman soldier’s uniform, with a gold sash. He is a Principality. Was a Principality? He’s not sure what his current standing is. Heaven, in the form of his former boss Gabriel, has tossed him from the garden. Yet God has not. Surely he’d have recalled if he’d suffered the Fall? Yes, he hung out with the wrong people. Yes, Crowley had rather come along to tempt him from the straight and narrow. Yes, one could even say he, like the demon, had sauntered vaguely downward. But there had been no plummet into a pool of brimstone. All things considered, he might even feel a bit favored-of-the-Lord at the moment—at least, on an ineffable scale of value used by a Divine Dealer to track the score of her own obscure and complex game of solitaire.

So. He chose to assume he was still a Principality. Of the threefold spheres of Heaven, he had been highest of the low. A guardian—of Gates, and Apples, and Gardens, and eventually of silly serpents who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain.

He still guarded his serpent…

“What?” he asked again, prodding the demon beside him.

“Apocalapse,” Crowley responded, giggling to himself, punch drunk and far too amused by his own jokes—a trait they both shared. Fortunately for Crowley, Aziraphale understood his jokes, and secretly delighted in them, just as Crowley delighted in Aziraphale’s quaint, prim witticisms. “I mean, it was kind of a bust as an actual Apocalypse. Bad as the Garden, innit? Went over like a lead balloon. But—makes a pretty good Apocalapse, yeah? Sort of went skiving off toward the end. Like the unicorn…”

Aziraphale chuckled, softly. Only he is there to recall the unicorn, and Crowley’s hopelessly ineffectual attempt to alert Shem of its escape. He and Crowley share so many memories no one else except, perhaps, her Ineffable Divinity, can call to mind.

“Good one,” he said, smiling. “Quite the bon mot.” Being booky, he quoted, “A pune, or a play on words.”

The demon stopped cold, swiveled his head, and scowled at Aziraphale. “Wha? Huh? Sounds obscene.”

Aziraphale sighed. When it comes to books, he is to Crowley what Crowley is to him where modern trends in music are concerned. “Pratchett,” he said. “Author. If he’s not one of ours I’m going to have words with…someone. He deserves better than Hell.”

“Oh. Books,” Crowley said, with wry comprehension. Who would read if they could listen to music and drive fast cars and play with new technology? But that’s his Angel for you—Crowley is quite sure Aziraphale’s still got the very first cuneiform tablet hidden in that bookstore of his…

Had the very first cuneiform tablet.

“You’re staying over at mine,” he said, firmly, leaping back to an invitation that had not been fully answered previously.

He and the Angel dance back and forth, weaving intricate patterns around each other, like English carillons ringing the changes. They pass each other, dodge, cross lines, return to old conversations centuries after they interrupted themselves, often with no sign that the intervening decades have even made a mark.

Aziraphale blinked and then gazed at Crowley, with that deer-in-the-headlights stare—and if anyone is familiar with the stare of things in the headlights, it’s Crowley. He looked away. The glasses were not enough to disguise his unsettled, shattering response to all that innocent shyness, and love, and fear.

“Can’t offer you Chateau de Pape,” he said, gruffly. “But I do have a bitch of a good grappa I picked up in Rome last summer. We can get soused. We deserve that much.” To cover still further, he said. “Anyway. We’ve got to plan. No sense getting a pointer from Nutsy the Witch if we don’t put some thought into how to use it.”

Slowly Aziraphale nodded, willing to accept this pragmatic excuse for, er…cohabiting, as it were. “Yes. Yes, that is a good idea. I could—”

“No. No stage magic,” Crowely snapped. “You Angel, me demon. WE do real magic, thank you ever so.”

Aziraphale pouted—but warmth glimmered in his eyes—blue-and-moss eyes, that have always seemed so pristine and sylvan, like the Garden where Crowley first saw them. “Very well. Agreed. But perhaps—perhaps a sleight of hand? We can fool the eye.” He smiled, then, sharing his cleverness with a quiet glee.

Crowley had to look away again. He could have lost all this. One wrong move over the last week and it would have been gone. His human body has some things wired into it—just as some things are wired into the very genes of small dogs, there are things wired into the hearts and souls and bodies of lanky, serpentine bodies worn by soft-hearted demons. In this case he ignores both tears and the desperate need to gulp. “Tired,” he said. “Think I’m going to sleep. Let me know when we get to London?”

He pretends to slip into dreamland at record speed, performing a tiny drama of false ignorance as his own jet black wing ducks and dodges around Aziraphale’s white wing, until, like nested shells, both wings protect the two fragile, valiant Empyrials who shelter beneath.

Aziraphale remained on watch. It was rather his role, after all. Before the Fall, Crowley was really never more than an ordinary angel—the bottom of the ladder, the least of the third sphere of Heaven. Not even a guardian angel, just a messenger with too much time on his hands and an imagination that tended to get him into trouble. You can see it in everything he does—the awareness that even before the Fall he was from the wrong side of the tracks. The underbelly of Heaven. But Aziraphale was a Principality…

Above Aziraphale are six entire ranks of angels, from the Powers and Thrones to the Cherubim and Seraphim. But he is a Principality. He is still a Principality, even after all that has happened. Even in the last ticking minutes of the Apocalapse. Highest of the low, and a guardian of nations. Of leaders. Of silly serpents who don’t know enough to admit they’re in love.

He closed his eyes and brought a book to memory—another prophetess. Not so accurate as Agnes Nutter, but perhaps of more tender perception. He rolled the words through his mind, as he gloried in the warmth of his friendship.

“And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

And so they stayed there, together, as the slow bus trundled into London, new-made spirits entering an entirely new-made dispensation.  
  
“…We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With alien people clutching their gods…”

T.S. Eliot, "The Journey of the Magi." 

**Author's Note:**

> Ok. I was good. I was sooooo good. Now--
> 
> I am PROUD of Crowley's coinage. I think Apocalapse is a brilliant pune, or play on words. Perfect for the Apocalypse that never happened. 
> 
> So--hee-hee. Giggle. Dance. Grin.
> 
> So damned smug. I love it when a good pune comes together.


End file.
